CIRCLE aims at demonstrating at industrial scale a first-of-its-kind retrofitted biorefinery for the valorisation of food waste streams and additional biomasses into high-value bio-based chemicals and intermediates, lactic acid (LA) as well as derived products, including polylactic acid (PLA), upgrading and expanding the production capacity of an existing biogas plant. The upgrade proposed will valorise the food waste streams currently processed for biogas production to produce LA ready for downstream high-value applications, including the production of PLA and derived new and higher-value products. The process will take advantage of the existing facility and of the renewable energy (biogas and heat) directly produced, thus making the production highly energy efficient. The proposed technology is highly scalable and replicable as it is designed to be deployed as an ‘add-on’ to existing food waste processing infrastructures. CIRCLE will reach the TRL8 by the end of the project by demonstrating the production of raw LA, which will be then converted into clean lactate salt (CLS) and into industrial and polymer-grade LA (≥ 95-99%). The polymer-grade LA will be in turn polymerized into a recyclable PLA, which can replace fossil-based polypropylene (PP) in a wide range of applications, with a significant impact on GHG emissions and environmental pollution avoidance. The application of bio-based chemicals and intermediates will be demonstrated through the production of a wide portfolio of bio-based products fully compliant with market requirements, such as cover cosmetics products (for CLS and LA), cleaning products (for LA) as well as the automotive, cosmetics and food packaging sectors (for PLA). The new circular value chain is expected to generate €20M of turnover and ca. 50 jobs. Retrofitting the existing biorefinery will allow saving at least 10% of the CAPEX.

SAFFI targets food for EU’s 15 million and China’s 45 million children under the age of three. It aims at developing an integrated approach to enhance the identification, assessment, detection and mitigation of safety risks raised by microbial and chemical hazards all along EU and China infant food chains. SAFFI will benchmark the main safety risks through an extensive hazard identification system based on multiple data sources and a risk ranking procedure. It will also develop procedures to enhance top-down and bottom-up hazard control by combining management options with a panel of technologies for the detection and mitigation of priority hazards. SAFFI will discover unexpected contaminants by predictive toxicology and improve risk-based food safety management of biohazards by omics and predictive microbiology. SAFFI will co-develop with and deliver to stakeholders a decision-support system (DSS) to enhance safety control all along the food chain. This DSS will integrate the databases, procedures and methods described above and will be a framework for a generic DSS dedicated to other food. This overall methodology will be implemented in two complementary European and Chinese mirror projects and exemplified for each, with four case studies that were selected to cover priority hazards, main ingredients, processes and control steps of the infant food chain. Resulting databases, tools and procedures will be shared, cross-validated, concatenated, benchmarked and finally harmonized for further use in the EU and China. SAFFI will also set up training and knowledge transfer activities to foster EU-China harmonization of good practices, regulations, standards and technologies, and will cluster with other projects under the EU-China FAB Flagship initiative for continuous upgrade of food safety control. This EU-China multi-actor consortium of 20 partners involves academia, food safety authorities, infant food companies, paediatrics and technological and data-science SMEs.